The Beat-en Path

A Documentary Film:

If you find yourself in a world that fits like a shoe that was made for someone else, with rules that serve some ancient paradigm, if you wake up every morning because you hope to make a difference, if you have that inconsolable drive, the one that stirs and yearns and abuses you endlessly, if you scour the earth for meaning, and you'll never settle, don't give up, you aren't alone.

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Here's the concept:

Our mission this summer is to travel around the country meeting everyday people who just want to make a difference. On this journey, we believe we'll discover a world full of people using their lives as a canvas to create beauty and innovation. If we can prove this theory, then perhaps this world won't feel as lonely, perhaps we won't feel so hopeless, perhaps the war that we should be fighting is the war on apathy.

Maria Montez

This post comes to us from artist and aestheticist satellite contributor Christopher Richmond, who keeps his own fascinating research blog, Something, Something, Hill of Bees.

Blue (1993)

Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.
Writer / Director Derek Jarman
Blue (1993) on IMDb

Sundance Winner IRISH FOLK FURNITURE

Have you seen the Sundance winner IRISH FOLK FURNITURE? It's a wonderful little meditation on design and tradition. It delivers nostalgia, aesthetics, humor, and a documentarian style without pretension. Awesome!

What is Phenomenology?

Today we're going to talk about a concept you might already be fairly familiar with, even if you haven't had time for much critical thought on the subject before now. Phenomenology literally "the study of that which is apparent", is the study of experience established by Edmond Husserl in the early 20th century. Phenomena (that which appears or is apparent) was defined by Immanuel Kant in his 1781 "Critique of Pure Reason" by its contrast with noumena, a "thing-in-itself".

The Face of Garbo

This post comes to us from artist and aestheticist satellite contributor Christopher Richmond, who keeps his own fascinating research blog, Something, Something, Hill of Bees.

Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. A few years earlier the face of Valentino was causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition.